


We're Not The Ones Who're Meant To Follow

by geckoholic



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-10-14
Updated: 2014-10-14
Packaged: 2018-02-19 00:36:12
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,282
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2367773
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/geckoholic/pseuds/geckoholic
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Before SHIELD falls, they're colleagues who only have a vague idea of who the other is. Afterwards, they've somehow become friends.</p>
            </blockquote>





	We're Not The Ones Who're Meant To Follow

**Author's Note:**

  * For [flipflop_diva](https://archiveofourown.org/users/flipflop_diva/gifts).



> For your requests for Steve and Natasha friendship and missing moments from TWS. Real life had me distracted, so it's short, but I hope you'll like it regardless. 
> 
> Beta-read by dotfic, who also brainstormed with me about the assignment. Thank you!! ♥ All remaining mistakes are mine.
> 
> Title is from "American Idiot" by Green Day.

It's Natasha's gut instinct that has her take the USB stick out of the vending machine, paired with a healthy dose of curiosity. Something's going on she doesn't know about, and that's not a feeling she generally enjoys. Steve is a crappy liar, signaling his discomfort for everyone who cares to pick up the clues, but that's not the extent of it. After he leaves, there's agents snooping around. Whatever they're looking for, Natasha wants to find it first, so she sacrifices a few dollars and secures the stick. She wanders off, nibbling a granola bar and smiling sweetly at the agents who pass her, then waits in a utility room until Rogers shows. 

She doesn't know a lot about Steve Rogers yet, but she does know that if there's something fishy going on within SHIELD, she'd rather share a side with him than with Rumloff and his bloodhounds. 

 

***

 

For all of his experience on the battlefield, planning and executing missions, Steve's out of his element when it comes to being on the run. Trying to melt into a crowd is a skill where as a kid he didn't even have to try, but after the serum, well. Captain America sort of sticks out. 

Natasha, on the other hand, was raised and trained to stay in the shadows. 

He follows her lead with a raised eyebrow but without question, ducks, laughs and kisses her at her behest, somewhat stunned by how well it all works. Not like he doubted her competence; she's good at what she does. He knew that. He just didn't know exactly _how_ good. Natasha plays people's weaknesses and expectations like a harp, and it's both fascinating and discomforting to witness. It also makes him wonder how much of what he's seen so far was Natasha and how much of it was Black Widow. 

He wants to find out. 

 

***

 

There aren't many people that meet Natasha head-on, who don't fall for her deflections, fear her for what she can be or dislike her for what she isn't. She spends so much time hidden behind a facade that it makes her stumble to come across someone who refuses to be distracted by the pretty surface. 

Rogers sees through her bullshit with a shrug, doesn't give her the easy out when she asks him what he wants her to be. _A friend._ Not part of her usual repertoire, that one. 

Then again, she would have been disappointed if he'd taken the bait. She realizes that as she silently watches him steer their stolen car to Long Island, his fingers tapping an erratic rhythm on the wheel, shoulders tense, not bothering to muster up a reassuring smile when their eyes meet. She holds his gaze for a moment or two, then allows herself to look away. She fidgets with the edge of her hoodie. 

_A friend._ Well, she's going to try. 

 

***

 

Natasha prides herself on her sense of humor, regardless of the eye rolls she keeps receiving from the recipients of her jokes. She had to build it from the ground up, any such nonsense trained out of her when she was a child, and she thinks, considering that, she's doing well. She likes to laugh. It makes her feel her freedom in a way not many other things can. 

If Steve wants to be friends with her, he should know what he's getting into. 

She starts to tell him dirty jokes about an hour into the drive, decides to throw him right into the deep end. He's from Brooklyn; she's been a kinda-sorta New Yorker long enough to assume he can take it. And he proves her right, doesn't blush or shy away from anything she throws at him. He keeps his eyes on the road, but his lips gradually curl up after a little while, and when she treats him to the translation of one of her favorite old Russian knee-slappers, he throws his head back and laughs. 

 

***

 

For all that he misses the people that had a part in it, Steve doesn't like to be thrown back into his past. The trip down memory lane in his old training camp pokes at wounds he hoped had scabbed over, and that's before Zola makes his comeback in form of a cold war computer and pulls the rug from under them. 

SHIELD is Hydra. He's been working for the very thing he died – well, kind of – to defeat. And yeah, he knows it's much more complicated, that not every agent he walked past in the hallway of the Triskelion just yesterday is a traitor, a wolf in sheep's skin. But he's not in the mood to sort through layers of gray until he can separate white from black. 

Then he looks at Natasha, sees the horror in her eyes and the shock written all over her face, powerful enough that she can't keep it concealed, and he knows she's thinking the same. All of a sudden they have so much more in common than they did when they walked into the bunker, and, selfish as it may be, he's just glad he's not alone in this. 

 

***

 

After the fight on the passageway, in between getting captured and broken out and reunited with a very much not dead Nick Fury, there's no time to talk. There's work to do, and if Steve's anything like her, then he wouldn't welcome the distraction of a heart to heart before the mission is done. 

And so she doesn't tell him that she can relate, sort of. That she knows what it feels like to have the person you trust most in the world look straight through you while they try to slit your throat. That she knows why killing The Winter Soldier has ceased to be an option the second Steve recognized him as Barnes. 

When comes to see him in the hospital and the first thing he tells her is that he's going to find Barnes and that he won't stop until he did, their eyes meet, and Natasha still doesn't tell him any of that. She does promise him she'll go through every one of her old contacts, dig up whatever she can, and he smiles at her, grateful and knowing and a little lopsided due to the fact that his face is still bruised and battered. 

 

*** 

 

He's not disappointed when she hands him the file but announces she'll run off on her own. If he'd ask, really ask, she'd join him, he's sure, and that's maybe why he doesn't. 

Sam and him take of without any real clue as to where they're going, and Steve supposes Sam knows that simply being on the move feels good, like progress they haven't made yet. They stop by a gas station in the middle of nowhere a couple of days later, and while Sam orders microwave meals and coffee for both of them, Steve absentmindedly thumbs through the newspapers on display near the counter. He grins when he skims the cartoon page of one of them and decides to put it on the register next to Sam's candy bars and soda, ignoring the questioning look Sam gives him. 

 

***

 

Natasha is halfway to a safe house in Madrid that no one at SHIELD ever knew about when Steve calls her. Well. Almost no one. She sets down her bags, lets the taxi she just flagged down drive away, and answers the call. 

“Hey,” he says, cutting right into her greeting. “Did anyone ever tell you the one about the corn cob that went out on a hot, sunny day and came back home as pop corn?” 

It's her turn to throw her head back and laugh.

**Author's Note:**

> [This](http://www.bestfunnyjokes4u.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/12/great-funny-cartoon.jpg) is the cartoon from the newspaper. IDEK, I was in a hurry to find something, lol.


End file.
